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As the year rapidly comes to a close, many publishers, GM’s and ad directors at community newspapers are putting the final touches on their 2011 ad revenue and budget forecasts.  And undertaking the forecasting endeavor can be a challenging, even frustrating process at times.

Over the years, I have developed a quick and easy template that helps develop ad revenue goals which then flow easily into an overall annual ad revenue and budget forecast.

Using the following formula to double-check or create an advertising revenue and budget forecast will save lots of time and effort while motivating sales teams and serving as a compass when navigating a tough economic environment.

Ad revenue goals, whether monthly and/or quarterly and/or annually, are all developed at the same time that annual ad revenue and budget goals are developed. In other words, 12 monthly 2011 individual monthly ad revenue goals for each territory or account list actually flow into the development of the total 2011 ad revenue goal (department wide) and ad budget.

For best results, a forecast is developed for every month in a given sales territory or account list. Additional items could be added or substituted (such as web page hosting revenue). Ad revenue goal revisions should and will take place over the course of the year due to market changes that may occur.

Ideally, each month is initially developed by the salesperson and subsequently reviewed and jointly agreed upon by salesperson and manager. The participation of the sales staff in this process helps motivate the staff, inasmuch as their input is included as part of setting goals for their territory or account list. Here's the formula:

Mark Horvit, executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, shares tips on getting public information that officials don’t want to release. Mark’s instruction is adapted from a workshop hosted by the Texas Center for Community Journalism on investigative reporting at community newspapers.

We journalists have always recognized the tendency to kill the messenger – because people often take out their frustrations on those who tell them what they don’t want to hear.

The messenger is not the cause of the bad tidings, but it’s easier to blame that messenger than to change the event he or she is reporting.

John Paton, CEO of the Journal Register group of newspapers, delivered a message last week that many Texas community newspapers might not want to hear – but it’s an important message we should all pay attention to.

Paton, in a speech to the Transformation of News Summit in Cambridge, Mass., put on by the International Newsmedia Marketing Association, said newspapers need to be “digital first” in everything they do.

Paton is no ivory-tower news philosopher. The Journal Register group has been living by that principle for the past year. The result: a company that was virtually bankrupt a year ago will have profit margins of about 15 percent this year.

The Journal Register has no papers in Texas – it publishes about 170 daily and weekly papers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey. And its total online audience is bigger than its print audience. Paton’s approach has been to outsource everything he can to other companies who can do it cheaper or better and to put the digital editions at the heart of his business.

The staff of the Center urges Texas publishers and other journalists to read what Paton has to say. Admittedly, he is talking about a newspaper group with some unique circumstances half a nation away. We’re certainly not urging most Texas publishers to adopt the Journal Register business model. But based on all the evidence we see, that model is the future.

Not today’s future, or tomorrow’s, or maybe even the next few years – but the inevitable future for what we now know as newspapers.

Even the Journal Register company still publishes ink-on-paper editions, but the core of their enterprise is now digital.

So take a few minutes to read Paton’s explanation of what his company has done. This explanation goes into the background of their decision to go digital-first and how they pulled it off.

And while the core of the enterprise for most of us is still print and will be for the foreseeable future, we must pay attention to ventures like this and give some thought to the digital transformation we will all eventually undergo.

I have a great deal of admiration for the smaller weekly newspaper publishers in rural Oklahoma. A growing number of them have other jobs because their communities can no longer support a full-time newspaper office.
In spite of that, they still have the passion to get the news out.

Many small town newspaper publishers are in the office before 7 a.m. A typical day ends after covering a sporting event, city council or the school board meeting that now, because of school consolidations, may be more than 30 miles from the town they live in.

Then there is the long day each week of putting the paper together followed by a mad dash to the print shop to pick it up. Then they insert (if they’re lucky enough to have them), get the papers labeled and to the post office and finally fill the racks.

Now they can take a quick breath just before rushing, with camera in hand, to start the whole process over again.
Church is a place most people go to keep their life in balance. But for the small town publisher it is a place to answer questions about what you had and didn’t have in that week’s paper.

The small weekly’s definition of an evening off is not having anything to cover so you can go to the office and write stories and work up the backlog of pictures you now have in your possession. Vacation is finding a week that you can put out the paper a day early so you can take a three-day getaway – without pay.

Call it lack of jobs, lack of trees, lack of rain, better birth control or the lack of sex, but the fact is that many rural communities in Oklahoma are dwindling.

With that comes an even bigger struggle to pay the utilities, the printing bill and the post office. No, I didn’t forget payroll. The reality is that many rural papers are a one-person operation and the only way they get paid is if there is any money left at the end of the month.

Because of that, more and more small town publishers are doing other jobs to help subsidize the newspaper.
It is not uncommon to see the weekly newspaper being produced after the day care is closed, with a person selling an insurance policy and a classified ad at the same time or operating an antique mall in the same office as the newspaper.

We have seen a closed sign on a paper’s office so the publisher can make an ambulance call and at one point a publisher in southwest Oklahoma cooked breakfast at his restaurant every morning, operated his flower shop during the day and then found the time and energy to put out a newspaper.

When the 2010 census figures come out most western Oklahoma publishers will jump for joy if the population of their community remains close to what it was 10 years ago.

For centuries there has been the provoking question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. In our industry the question has been which died first, the town or the newspaper?

The answer is simple: the town, because I have never seen a town that could support a newspaper not have one. Like many others, some day the number of rural community newspapers will shrink, not because of the decline of the newspaper industry but rather the decline of many rural Oklahoma towns.

The small weekly publisher has been forced to become creative in finding ways to keep the news coming to his or her community.

I appreciate their commitment to do so and hope their readers understand how lucky they are to have someone who is committed to report the news and preserve the history of their town.

If there was ever any doubt about the utility and worth of a reporter’s privilege against third party requests for information, the proof is in.

In just over 14 months since the passage of the Texas Free Flow of Information Act, the number of subpoenas for trial testimony, document production or broadcast reproductions has dropped dramatically. Newsrooms across Texas are back doing the work they were made to do: securing the news and broadcasting or publishing it to the public for the common good.

For years, advocates of the broadcast and publishing industry lobbied the Texas Legislature for the passage of a shield law. Because our Legislature meets only every two years, the time required to pass this law was twice what it might have been. In the legislative sessions in 2005, 2007 and 2009, free speech advocates took their message to both the House and Senate. Finally, the current law was passed by both houses and became effective May 13, 2009.

Before the passage of the FFOIA, Texas newsrooms were being inundated by requests for information, trial subpoenas and document subpoenas by both civil and criminal litigants. It had become the quickest, easiest way for litigants to secure factual information that had been gathered and published by news organizations. While that was a cost-saving method for those litigants, the cost to the news organizations was both substantial and unavoidable.

Newsrooms had to set up standard protocols to manage and answer the innumerable requests. Most times, in order to ensure they were following the law correctly, this entailed the use of outside counsel, adding yet another cost to the transaction. While the actual costs of newsroom time, resources and attention spent on these requests were never quantified, the sheer number of requests highlights the depth of the problem.

According to statistics compiled by the Texas Association of Broadcasters, in the years leading up to the passage of the FFOIA, newsrooms were being subjected to an average of 30 requests per year, or one every two weeks. Some major market stations were served with subpoenas once every six days while another smaller market station was shut down for nearly two days in order to comply with the subpoena.

Since the passage of the FFOIA, the numbers have dropped so dramatically that averages are in the single digits. Most stations report that just quoting the FFOIA provisions to the requestor has stopped most subpoenas in their tracks. While the bill passage was watched closely by media outlets, it is not well known outside those circles.

This is great news for the news organizations and not the death knell for litigants the opponents of the bill foretold. There is no indication that fewer civil cases are being filed because the litigants can’t secure their proof from news organizations. Certainly, there is no indication that fewer criminals are being punished or set free because of this change.

Indeed, all the FFOIA actually did is return the litigants to the status they have always had under the law. They have just as many rights now as then, just as many legal theories with which to seek a civil remedy, and just as many sources of actual facts from those who were involved in them: not from a third party news source who arrived after the fact and reported what was told to them by the actual participants. Rather than having created a news room untouchable by the courthouse process, the FFOIA allows the news room to return to their assigned role in society — to gather and report the news.

Aaron Chimbel, a faculty member at the TCU Schieffer School of Journalism, led a workshop for community journalists in September 2010 on shooting and editing simple video stories using the Flip video camera. Below are his handouts from the workshop.

Andrew Chavez, associate director of the Texas Center for Community Journalism, speaks at a TCCJ Watchdog Workshop on Web applications that can be useful in investigative reporting.

(Editor’s note:  In this thinkpiece, Jerry Grotta, associate director of TCCJ, reacts to the news that the Audit Bureau of Circulations has changed the way newspaper circulation is counted, beginning Oct. 1. The changes include newspapers now being able to count subscribers more than once — a subscriber may be counted once for a print subscription, once for an e-reader subscription, etc. This also includes online, mobile and other subscriptions. Also, newspapers may include products published under a different name in their total average circulation.)

Several years ago I heard the following at a conference on newspaper circulation:

The owner of a newspaper was hiring a new publisher. He narrowed the candidates to three current employees — the advertising manager, the editor and the circulation manager. As a final step, the owner conducted a three-hour interview with each candidate. His final question was: “How much is two and two?”

The advertising manager answered: “Two and two is four. Never less, never more.” The publisher said, “Very precise.”

The editor said, “Well, two plus two is four. But two twos side-by-side is 22. And two divided by two is one.” The publisher said, “Very creative.”

The circulation director leaned toward the owner and whispered, “How much do you want them to be?”

And that sums up the history of newspaper circulation.

Here’s how Timothy Hughes reports on what John Campbell said about a competitor’s circulation:

The earliest comment on newspaper circulation in America was by publisher John Campbell in his Boston News-Letter of 1719. He notes that “… he cannot vend 300 at an impression, tho’ some ignorantly concludes he sells upwards of a thousand…”

Did newspapers really lie? Here is why the Audit Bureau of Circulations was formed in 1914:

For more than 90 years, the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) has served as the trusted industry standard in audited circulation figures. This commitment began at the turn of the century, a time when unscrupulous business practices dominated the publishing industry and made it difficult for advertisers and publishers to form effective partnerships.

As long as circulations were growing through the first half of the 20^th century, newspapers were reaping big profits. However, the household penetration had been declining, from 100+ percent in the 1950s to about 30 percent today.

And then actual circulation began to decline. In just the past decade, weekday circulation has fallen 28.4 percent between 2000 and 2010, while Sunday circulation has declined 30.4 percent.

Why?

While television still dominates overall as a source of news, it has declined from more than 70 percent in 1991 to less than 60 percent in 2010.

Radio declined from 54 percent in 1991 to 34 percent in 2010.

And newspapers dropped from 55 percent in 1991 to 31 percent in 2010. That’s a 44 percent decline.

Where did all the viewers, listeners and readers go?

To the Internet.

Online as a news source was first measured in 2004, with 24 percent. In 2010, it has risen to 34 percent — or higher than newspapers and radio.

However, 44 percent get their news from some form of Web and mobile media, second only to television and 30 percent more than from newspapers.

So what are newspapers doing? Trying frantically to find new ways to measure circulation and readership, such as including hits on their websites, such as “requested” verified circulation, and “targeted” circulation (where people do not object to having newspaper products delivered to their homes).

How will this affect newspapers? For one thing, it will make “audited circulation” much more complicated. The overall effect on “circulation” numbers is still uncertain.

But one thing is certain. The old newspaper model is broken.

Nearly 40 years ago, Richard Maisel said in an article in Public Opinion Quarterly:

The (traditional) mass media are actually shrinking in size relative to the total economy.

And I wrote in an article in Journalism Quarterly in 1974:

If the newspaper is to survive in the decades ahead, it must do so on the basis of offering the consumer a product which fulfills the needs of the consumer.

We can see in the continued decline in the circulation and readership of major daily newspapers that the industry hasn’t done a very good job of producing a product “which fulfills the needs of the consumer.”

But how are community newspapers doing?

A whole lot better than the big dailies!

Here’s how the National Newspaper Association describes the situation:

Today, the distinguishing characteristic of a community newspaper is its commitment to serving the information needs of a particular community. The community is defined by the community’s members and a shared sense of belonging. A community may be geographic, political, social or religious. A community newspaper may be published once a week or daily. Some community newspapers exist only in cyberspace. Any newspaper that defines itself as committed to serving a particular community many be defined as a “community newspaper.”

Despite the emergence of new information technologies such as the Internet, community newspapers continue to play an important role in the Information Age. Over 150 million people are informed, educated and entertained by a community newspaper every week. Moreover, the value of community newspapers continues to grow as they seek new ways to serve their readers and strengthen their communities.

Why does the future look brighter for community newspapers? People are interested in community news, but television, radio stations, and large daily newspapers can’t give comprehensive coverage of every community in their markets.

Community newspapers can . . . if they:

• Focus their coverage on the local community – who, what, where, when, why and how.
• Offer people in the community a variety of well-designed sources for their local news and advertising from your newspaper (the printed version, a web version, etc.)
• Talk to – and listen to – the people in the community. How do they feel about your newspaper? What do they like and dislike about it?

If you do not do this, somebody else will!